An Explanation Simple Enough For Trump: Why Nuclear Weapons Are Not A Toy (VIDEO)

The danger of nuclear weapons, and Trump’s support for them

The Youtube popular channel Minute Physics has released a video on ‘Why Should We Care About Nukes” which graphically explains the horrifying dangers of nuclear weapons, including the huge potential for accidents, and environmental devastation. This is something that the Republican front-runner Donald Trump seems not to comprehend. His recent statements about nuclear weapons proves he would be too dangerous to have control of them.

On Tuesday, Trump spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper during a town hall segment, and gave one of the most dangerous and stupid declarations of his entire presidential campaign. The leading candidate thinks more countries should actually have nuclear weapons; countries such as South Korea, Japan or Saudi Arabia. It’s clear that Trump lacks any knowledge or logic comprehension of international relations, world politics and nuclear weapons. Trump scary opinions on nuclear weapons are seriously dangerous.

Trump has said he is against nuclear proliferation, but now he says that other countries, powerful countries, should have nuclear weapons, so the US won’t have to defend them. Is he contradicting himself, or does he not even know what ‘proliferation‘ means? His explanation on why his view is not contradictory, as he told Cooper, is

“You have North Korea has nuclear weapons and he doesn’t have a carrier yet but he’s got nuclear weapons, he soon will have. We don’t wanna pull the trigger, we’re just, you know we have a president frankly that doesn’t nobody is afraid of our president, nobody respects our president…”

This answer goes on rambling for a while and ends up talking about some ridiculous amounts of money, the military support of the US to other countries, and how ungrateful those countries are in paying almost nothing back to America. When interrupted by Cooper, who tried to bring Trump back to the topic and explain to him that it has been US policy to prevent Japan from developing nuclear weapons, Trump’s answer was it was then time to change the policy

“because so many people, you have Pakistan has it, you have China has it. You have so many other countries are now having it.”

When asked then if ‘some’ proliferation was okay, the candidate again replied he hates proliferation. However, he believes at some point the US has to understand that it is better if countries like Japan or South Korea are capable of protecting themselves. Hence, yes, he believes some proliferation is okay. He doesn’t seem to realize that this logic would then be available to any country. What would stop Iran from arguing that it needs to protect itself from Israel? Trump may not understand it, but under his logic it is exactly what he is saying. In addition, Trump believes proliferation is going to happen anyway, unless there is a complete elimination of this type of weapons (precisely what the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons aims at, which he doesn’t seem to know about).

Wednesday on an MSNBC Town Hall, hosted by Chris Matthews, the Republican candidate tried to explain why he would use a nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Matthews unsuccessfully tried to explain to Trump the dangers of his comments,

“The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in ’45, heard it. They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.”

As physicist Max Tegmark, guest in Minute Physics video explains, the US and Russia have enough nukes each to provoke a nuclear winter, which could kill most people on earth. And although we might think that no rational leader of a nation, knowing the dangers of nuclear weapons, would dare to use them the main problem with nuclear weapons is that these can be triggered accidentally. And the odds of accidentally launching a nuclear arsenal grow with the increasing number of nuclear weapons. Now lets imagine nuclear weapons are developed by even more countries.

Experts such as Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, have also explained why allowing your friends to have these weapons is dangerous to you, to them and to the entire world. As he told Business Insider,

“Everybody has a friend. And so if you can give them the path of saying it’s good when our allies have them and bad when our enemies have them, you get to the point where everybody has them… If South Korea and Japan were to acquire their own nuclear deterrents, that would send an incredibly dangerous signal to our allies in the Middle East.”

Hopefully the simple drawings in the following video will make the candidate either understand, or at least avoid talking about the nuclear issue.

From Mexico City, Carolina has lived in five different countries, experiences she defines as the most enriching. She has focused her studies and work on international conflicts and international security issues, diplomacy and protocol. Carolina holds two MA degrees and hopes to begin her PhD studies soon.